The Gloves Come Off and Other Updates

We’re happy to report that after almost three months, Eleanor’s gloves have come off. Since practically the day she was born, Eleanor had a habit of gouging her face with her sharp fingernails. At first, it was just because she had no control over her hands and they would swipe at her face as she flailed around. A little later, she would definitely be clutching her hands near her face whenever she was fussy. Either way, without gloves Eleanor was getting scratches on her face — she would occasionally draw blood. It didn’t help to trim her nails. I was doing that every other day with nail scissors followed by an emery board. Her nails would somehow end up long enough and sharp enough to scratch again before I would notice it.

Recently though, we’ve noticed that she’ll rub her eyes when she’s tired, but know to use the back of her hands. She’ll also bring her hands up to her mouth to lick and suck. When her hands are covered with gloves, she tentatively licks them a couple of times and then stops with a look on her face that we interpret as ‘that didn’t taste very good”. Without gloves, she’ll suck on her hand for much longer. So last week, we removed her gloves during the day to see if she could do that without scratching herself again. It worked okay so earlier this week we stopped putting the gloves on her at all. We think she’s happier without them.

Among the other updates, we’ve put away all of the short sleeved onesies in favor of long sleeved sleepers, we’ve stopped using the Huggies size 1 diapers, we’ve mostly stopped swaddling, the girls are definitely “talking” more, and they’ve been known to go six or seven hours between feedings during the night.

It was with a bit of sadness that we put away all of the zero-to-three-month onesies last week. We received all of them as gifts from friends and family and they were all quite cute. We put them away because some of them were getting too small and all of them were not quite warm enough. The weather is starting to turn a little cooler here (in Southern California, that means 70^o F or below), and the long sleeved sleepers keep them warmer at night. By the time the weather warms up again for them to be back in short sleeves, they’ll be much too big for these onesies.

The size 1 Huggies diapers started leaking this week. We knew that they were starting to get a little snug around our girls’ plump bellies, but our decision was made when we found ourselves changing the girls’ damp outfits because of a diaper failure. We still have a whole unused box of Huggies marked “size 1-2″ (which in reality contain only size 1 diapers–Huggies claims that they should work for babies up to fifteen pounds). We’ll have to find someone to donate them to. At most places where you buy diapers in bulk (Costco, Babies R Us, Target, etc) it seems that they stock only these size 1-2 Huggies in order to save the shelf space they would need for size 2 diapers. We tried a few size 3 Huggies this week, and while they hold, they are also a little big on the girls. Agnes picked up some size 2 Pampers yesterday, and so we’ll use those for a little while.

Swaddling has served us well over these past three months. Initially, the swaddling was used to keep our girls from startling themselves awake. People also say that infants are comforted in the first three months by the snugness of a swaddle as it mimics their condition in the womb. We recently tried just putting the girls in their cribs without swaddling them, and most of the time they sleep just fine. Every now and then we will know that the girls are tired, but they’ll fuss around a bit. For those occasions, we will still swaddle them and then they fall asleep pretty quickly. For the most part though, we think we’re done with the swaddling.

When I said that the girls are talking more, it is of course not really with any recognizable words. At this age, they coo at us, we respond with similar sounds, and they smile. They’re starting to produce some consonant sounds, though it’s nothing very consistent. Eleanor has a “guuuuhhh” or “goooo” sort of sound that she makes. With Miranda, she starts with her lips together and ends up with “boooooooooo” (it trails off after quite a while–we joke that she’s getting ready for Halloween). It can be fun to make noises at them and get them to smile, but for some reason, they seem to like doing it most at 2am when they really should be sleeping.

Finally, we’ve started seeing longer stretches at night where the girls don’t need to be fed. During the day, they wake up in time to eat about every four hours. At night, they’re starting to go a bit longer. Last night, Eleanor ate at 7pm and didn’t eat again until 4:45am. Miranda went six hours between her bottles. It still doesn’t give us a full night’s sleep, but it’s getting a lot better.

It’s a lot of changes, and most of them for the better. Is this the mythical three month “switch” that people talk about when babies become much easier and more fun to raise? Who knows? These changes have been nice, and hopefully things will continue to improve. We should have our three month pictures up around the middle of next week.